Ponsot, who is enjoying something of a reawakening of interest in her poetry, after writing for more than fifty years, was praised in a New York Times article, “Recognition at Last for a Poet of Elegant Complexity,” written by Dinitia Smith. “A Marie Ponsot poem,” Smith writes, “is a little like a jeweled bracelet, carefully carved, with small, firm stones embedded in it.” Smith wrote this article after Ponsot had been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for the collection The Bird Catcher. Smith goes on to say that Ponsot's poems are “full of carefully thought-out rhetorical strategies,” pointing out, for example, Ponsot's tendency to use ampersands (&) instead of the word “and” in order to maintain the rhythm of the words in her poems. Smith then quotes Ponsot, who says her poems “are meant to be beautiful” and adds that this is “a very unfashionable...